Bat Out of Hell may be the most inevitable jukebox musical ever staged. Meat Loaf’s twin albums, written by Jim Steinman, sound more like musical theater than most musical theater; it doesn’t hurt, I’m sure, that together they’ve sold almost sixty million copies. In other words, it would be hard to screw this up: toss […]
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STRATFORD, ON— The fate of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s late history Henry VIII has been tumultuous, to say the least. Cannon fire from the first production burned down the original Globe Theatre in 1613. Defying augury, the new Globe Theatre mounted a respectable but ultimately forgettable revival in 2010. Popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, […]
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STRATFORD, ON—Noël Coward said that the critical response to his Private Lives “connoted in the public mind ‘cocktails,’ ‘evening dress,’ ‘repartee’ and irreverent allusions to copulation,” and director Carey Perloff seems to have similar ingredients in mind with her current staging of the play at the Stratford Festival. When Elyot Chase (Geraint Wyn Davies) first […]
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STRATFORD, ON—The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exercise in controlled chaos. Jam-packed with a cast of parsons, physicians, gentleman, and mistresses (rather than ladies), the stage explodes with personalities of all types. At the center of this chaos are the mischievous Mistresses Alice Ford (Sophia Walker) and Anne Page (Brigit Wilson), who have decided […]
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STRATFORD, ON—In the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building, the tables are littered with cigarette butts, half-filled glasses of liquor, and empty Chinese takeout containers. Reporters smoke, play cards, and occasionally phone their editors, either to report a story or to make one up. By morning, Earl Williams (Johnathan Sousa) will be hanged for […]
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STRATFORD, ON—The play bears Othello’s (Michael Blake) name, but the tragedy really belongs to Iago (Gordon S. Miller), who has seven soliloquies to Othello’s two. This nihilistic, black hole of a character falls on the far end of Shakespeare’s conception of evil, a natural endpoint after Aaron the Moor and Richard III. No production can […]
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Sea Wall and A Life, a pair of monologues currently running back-to-back at the Hudson Theatre, are small, quiet plays. In Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, a photographer Alex (Tom Sturridge) tells stories about his father-in-law and his daughter; in Nick Payne’s A Life, Abe (Jake Gyllenhaal) oscillates between narrating his own father’s death and his […]
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When they first meet, Jason (Alex Hernandez) confuses Medea (Sabina Zúñiga Varela) for a bird, “El Guaco” or “the laughing falcon.” Likewise, when the audience first sees her, she is flapping a pair of large banana palms, like the guaco ready to take flight. But the comparison is misleading: in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, an adaptation […]
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Coriolanus (Jonathan Cake) is Shakespeare’s most baffling protagonist, an ornery Roman general who seethes with contempt for both the political elite and the commoners. After the conquest of a Volscian city, Coriolanus returns home and briefly runs for consul. But he refuses to participate in symbolic gestures of respect for the plebeians and is summarily […]
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